Why We Are So Bad at Solving Problems
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Before you raise your voice, please allow me to say that I do indeed know this starts to feel like a set of Russian dolls, and this is a re-run of a r
[See the full post at: Why We Are So Bad at Solving Problems]Magnificent! Well worth running every year. Let me thank you again for your blog.
It’s so easy to forget that the Global problems can only be worked on as local remediation. Even if our local solutions cannot scale up, they may hopefully help us to be farther from the train wreck when it comes.
So back to basics of improving my health and setting up local networks and safety nets. How else can we be proactive, and not “just” reactive? Preparing for the earthquake in our economy and society.
You’re talking universal problems there, Glennda, in Meadows’ definition. The global ones we cannot solve.
This is where OpEdNews published the article. They are a ‘progressive’ site.
OK….I have debated long about making a comment – but I will.
Whilst not religious – I DO firmly believe that everything happens for a reason. Problem is, I don’t always know (or even need to know) what it is.
And yet, I see so much evidence of many, many people awakening at this pivotal time. Slowly but surely.
Thing is – I do recognise the need for some “event” (whether that be Planet X, a false flag or some other) to then galvanise those people into either action – or at the very least – harmony/unity/like-mindedness.So take heart – we are at the tipping point – don’t run out of hope or puff in the final innings!!! :)))
BTW – a very good question to ask is WHY is the economy being deliberately bankrupted?? Hint….. follow the money.
Take heart all, especially those who have been beating the drum for a while…..
@VisionHawk – Agree, my thoughts too.
I think I remember this from past; and no surprise, we are on almost exactly the same page. Which is why I’ve lived off-grid for 40ish years, with an energy footprint around 1/50th of standard. Didn’t start doing it to prove anything; just my choice of how to live.
One other comment: “Stephen Jay Gould described evolution: through punctuated equilibrium.” Eh. My opinion – Gould was a little too impressed with his astonishing insight. Which wasn’t new; it was previously called evolution by “saltation”, i.e. “jumping”; well discussed for decades- if you were an academic evolutionist. Yep, bottlenecks are important; but in fact evolution happens in ONLY ONE WAY (that’s a joke) – specifically; it always happens – in every possible way conceivable; every time. Provable.
I think I remember this from past; and no surprise, we are on almost exactly the same page. Which is why I’ve lived off-grid for 40ish years, with an energy footprint around 1/50th of standard. Didn’t start doing it to prove anything; just my choice of how to live.
One other comment: “Stephen Jay Gould described evolution: through punctuated equilibrium.” Eh. My opinion – Gould was a little too impressed with his astonishing insight. Which wasn’t new; it was previously called evolution by “saltation”, i.e. “jumping”; well discussed for decades- if you were an academic evolutionist. Yep, bottlenecks are important; but in fact evolution happens in ONLY ONE WAY (that’s a joke) – specifically; it always happens – in every possible way conceivable; every time. Provable.
Wel, whaddaya. A double helping of Greenpa. Yes, yes, but there’s no denying that “punctuated equilibrium” sounds a hell of a lot more scientific and impressive than ”jumping”. And Gould DID throw his ‘science’ off its established course, because that’s not how the professors saw things at all. In far too many ways, yesteryear’s evolutionists were like today’s economists. Still are, for all I know.
🙂 sorry about the double; my computer balked at the post, so I hit the button again- didn’t worry about it because in the past your blog program has caught those and prevented doubles; with the nice message “It looks like you already said that.”
– which is why they called it “saltation”, dontchaknow.
And- I would have to bet you are familiar with the aphorism, extant in multiple cultures but most distilled by Lao-tse; “The man who speaks, does not know. The man who knows, does not speak.” Something I have confirmed in many, many scientific meetings/seminars. The guy on the podium is pushing his stuff; the guy asking pushy questions is impressed with his own views. Sitting in the back row, are two emeritus professors, not saying anything out loud, but whispering to each other. Approach cautiously, speak politely, ask their opinion; and what you will get is “Well…… I don’t know…..” Those two emeritus guys do know more than anyone else in the room- and if you continue cultivating, they will share what they don’t know and don’t understand with you – leaving you vastly more educated than the guys making all the noise even know is possible. And the emeritus guys are polite- too polite to speak up and embarrass the speaker, pointing out “Why, yes, Leibitsch published exactly those observations in 1867…”
I agree that the vast majority of “evolution news” published today is crap. I’ve moaned about it in detail with a couple of my emeritus friends; they are more burned out about it than I am – “I’ve given up trying to correct this junk, the editors don’t care any more.” The conversations worth listening to- are almost entirely in whispers. True.
Another ancient bit of human behavior – Lao-tse knew it around 500 BCE; and it was old then.
>>BTW – a very good question to ask is WHY is the economy being deliberately bankrupted?? Hint….. follow the money.<<
Because an economy is bankrupted into the hands of the people who lent the money into the economy in the first place.
The Debt-Money Monopolists want to control the planet, and with the acquiescence of the media that won’t expose this operation, they will do it in due time.The Debt-Money Monopolist financed boot readies for our collective necks.
HI Ilargi,
Raising the dead eh?! Must be why I’m back.
The problem is there are no problems. A problem by its nature suggests a solution, and as there are no ‘solutions’ there are no problems.
What there are in fact are systems, as there always have been. These systems are myriad in form and nature, and interact with both themselves and other systems in a highly complex way. They are also constantly changing in a dynamic equilibrium, new ones evolving, while others both new and old die off. The much used term hyper-complexity doesn’t even come close. We, who think we are autonomous individuals, are part of the human system, which itself has myriad subsystems, from language and thought to all sorts of knowledge systems and systems of technique, euphemistically called technology (which is a bit like calling the animal kingdom zoology – any ology is the study of something, not the thing in itself). All of these systems are in a state of flux, which is what Schrodinger was perhaps alluding to in his 1944 work “What is Life”. Think for a moment when that book was written… and all of the ‘systems’ that have come and gone, and those that are still stubbornly clinging on. The most stubborn thought system is that of capitalism, and is the religion of today; why else would 400,000 copies of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” be given away to high school students every year by the Ayn Rand Institute’. Her objectivist philosophy however is a closed system, and as such suffers all the ‘problems’ that such a system will incur, it will drown in its own excrement, or be forced to eat it, or both.
“My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”
— Ayn Rand, Atlas ShruggedOh those patriarchal heroes, written by a woman no less, but then she was pretty down on her own sex, apparently stating on a television interview that a woman should never become president. Bad luck Hilary… It is in my mind, the last bastion of the reductionist/materialist/egoist mindset that emerged out of the first phase of the industrial/scientific revolution, before the realisations of quantum physics and systemantics took hold, and is epitomised in the ‘Jetsons’ cartoon of the early sixties; the notion that material progress (on the back of neo-liberal capitalist idealogy) would take us all to a technological utopia. That this dinosaur 1950s L. Ron Hubbard-esq system has survived points only to one thing, that it has been adopted as a religion by those who run the ‘Empire’, much as the decaying Roman empire adopted Christianity and became the Holy Roman Catholic Empire. After all, if god is dead as Nietzsche suggested, and all hope of a spiritual life, what else is left to idolise but material creation? Arise the empire of consumption. Yet as we know, all empires rise, exist for a while and then collapse, usually down to resource depletion/destruction, economic collapse, and/or invasion by another empire. Also their leaders always end up corrupted, almost as if its a natural law.
However, unlike all other forms of ‘super colony’, from ants to reindeer stuck on islands with no predators, humans have an ability for reflection, that for some members of the species at any rate goes beyond the current models of reality, and allows the possibility of the formation of new models. Like new species, it will be down to pure chance whether these new systemic models such as permaculture or the ‘gift economy’ (Eisenstein) will survive the coming extinction of the existing dinosaurs, and find niches to ride out the storm and take over when the big beasts are all dead. One thing is for sure, symbiotic cooperation and not just tooth and claw competition is a key to survival of any species. No one species can ever dominate an ecosystem, as an ecosystem itself relies upon diversity. That much systems ecology has taught us. Meadows predictions are bang on, he was just wrong about any of it being a ‘problem’.
As for Zombies, if Atlas Shrugged, Lazarus laughed!
L,
Sid.
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